As India gets ready for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the two key states of West Bengal and Bihar are going to prove very crucial in ensuring who forms the next government at the Centre. Both states are ruled by strong regional parties led by charismatic leaders who are yet to clearly spell out their plans for the next Lok Sabha elections.

According to a CSDS-CNN-IBN survey, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal has consolidated its position since the last Lok Sabha elections in 2009 while the situation is not so clear in Bihar where the Janata Dal (United) snapped its ties with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) following the elevation of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as election campaign committee chief.

The TMC is not only going retain its dominant position in West Bengal but will leave its rivals way behind if elections are held in July 2013. The survey shows the TMC winning 23-27 seats compared to just 19 that the party had in 2009 even though its vote share has increased by just one percentage point to 32 from 31 the last time.

West Bengal and Bihar are going to prove very crucial in ensuring who forms the next government at the Centre in 2014.

Mamata's arch-rivals the Left Front has slipped back further and most probably will end with just 7-11 seats from the 15 that it has in the current Lok Sabha while the Congress is likely to bag 5-9 seats and BJP 0-2.

While most people prefer the present TMC government (39 per cent) to previous Left Front government (29 per cent), particularly in rural areas; but in urban areas, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's government favoured more than Mamata Banerjee's.

The TMC government is also being blamed by more people for the chit fund scam with most people also saying that its fallout has been handled poorly by the Mamata Banerjee government. While Mamata rode to power in West Bengal ending the 34-year long rule of the Left Front using the slogan of "parivartan" (change), half of those surveyed say they are yet to see any major change.

While West Bengal essentially remains a two horse race, the picture in Bihar is much more complicated with three-cornered race in most of the seats after the JD(U) parted ways from the BJP. Lalu Prasad's Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) is trying hard to regain some lost ground and the survey reveals that the former Bihar chief minister seems to have succeeded to making some inroads.

For Bihar Chief Nitish Kumar the fight has only got tougher and his party may end up with 15-19 seats in the next Lok Sabha, which will lower than its current tally of 20 MPs. Even though the JD(U) has managed to increase it vote share to 25 per cent from 24 in the last Lok Sabha election, BJP's emergence as a strong challenger seems to have hit the JD(U) in some pockets of the state.

The satisfaction level with his government has plunged from an unprecedented high of 90 per cent to 69 while the dissatisfaction is up from 9 per cent to 25.

But the BJP too is not sitting very pretty although the party's vote share has seen a huge jump to 22 per cent from 14. While the eight per cent increase in vote share should have ensured more seats to the BJP, what has stopped its march is an equally impressive show by the RJD which has seen its share rising to 24 per cent from 19 in 2009 Lok Sabha elections.

Both the BJP and RJD are projected to win 8-12 seats each by the CSDS-CNN-IBN survey with the Congress, which has hinted that it is eyeing Nitish Kumar's support, a distant fourth with 0-4 seats, Ram Vilas Paswan's Lok Janshakti Party and others likely to bag 0-2 seats.

Even as the survey shows that Nitish Kumar's strategy to dump and BJP and go alone has not paid rich dividends, there is still some good news for him as the survey also shows that the Bihar Chief Minister remains the most popular non-Congress, non-BJP choice for the Prime Minister of India with 12 per cent of the respondents reposing their faith in him. Nitish is followed by Mayawati (9 per cent), Mamata Banerjee and Samajwadi Party supreme Mulayam Singh Yadav (8 per cent), NCP chief Sharad Pawar and Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik (4 per cent) and J Jayalalithaa (3 per cent).